This chapter explains how revolutionary Americans understood what had happened in 1776. There is ample evidence showing that they viewed the Declaration as creating one nation, at least with respect to the world. The United States of America was regularly spoken of as a nation and was treated as a nation with respect to issues such as foreign relations and citizenship. The Continental Congress had little hesitation in reversing the decisions of state courts. A functioning confederacy, recognized as such, long predated the Articles of Confederation. The chapter concludes with the case of North Carolina and Rhode Island and argues that they were never formally outside of the United States, even during the period in which they had failed to ratify the US Constitution.

This chapter examines the compound republic established by the U.S. Constitution, emphasizing its innovative balance of national and state powers. Unlike the Articles of Confederation’s league of states, the Constitution was ratified by the people, not state legislatures, and thereby creates a national government with direct authority over individuals, but only within its assigned sphere. This “new science of politics,” as Hamilton termed it, departs from Montesquieu’s view that republics suit only small territories, enabling a robust union capable of addressing external threats and internal defects such as the ineffective taxation and defense under the Articles. Madison’s writings in The Federalist highlight the Constitution’s blend of national and federal elements, ensuring legitimacy through popular sovereignty while preserving state autonomy in areas outside the enumerated powers. The chapter explores the Webster-Hayne Debate and Jackson’s response to South Carolina’s tariff nullification to refute secession and nullification and reaffirm the Constitution’s supremacy, while acknowledging states’ roles in “interposition,” as in the 1798 Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, to alert citizens to potential federal overreach.

Using the library of eighteenth-century attorney and legal historian Frances Hargrave as a starting point, this chapter considers the place of law, property, and state formation in the causes and results of the American Revolution. Focusing on three related themes to the place of laws in independence – the influence and break from English legal culture, the pluralism of legal practice within North America, and the place of legal institutions in either maintaining or changing the status quo – this chapter considers how both different forms of property and the different individuals and communities involved with it played a central role in the creation of an independent United States. The governments that emerged from the Revolution each relied heavily on these varied legal threads.

In popular perceptions, the “Constitutional Convention” usually seems a miraculous achievement and the apex of American civic life. But the work pursued in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 was far more complex and contingent that we usually remember. Delegates arrived in Philadelphia in May to pursue their charge of revising the Articles of Confederation in order to keep the young and troubled republic united. They quickly changed course: Saving the union, they decided, required more sweeping changes than simply revising the existing government. For several months, they discussed, disagreed, compromised, and endured setbacks and disappointments to craft an entirely new, federal design of government. This chapter explores the Philadelphia convention (renamed, after the fact, the Constitutional Convention) to reveal the framers’ wide-ranging debates, including about the nature of representation, the place of racial slavery in the American republic, and state vs. federal powers.

In June of 1776, the Continental Congress voted to declare independence as thirteen United States, seeking not just to transform the governments of those states, but to undertake a transformation of the international system from which it sought recognition and legitimacy. Diplomacy lay at the heart of the American Revolution, to win the war and to position the United States as the hegemonic power in North America. This chapter analyzes how leaders such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson used diplomacy over five decades from the Declaration of Independence (1776) to the Monroe Doctrine (1823) to enact a revolution in international affairs that would result in the distancing of newly independent republics in Western hemisphere from direct involvement in the European state system, the marginalizing of Indigenous nations, and the elevating of the United States to a position of hegemony.

This chapter explores the multifaceted challenges facing the new nation during the Confederation period, including the final years of warfare and its consequences, sectional and regional divisions, class tensions, diplomatic squabbles, economic failures, and threats to national sovereignty from enemies both foreign and domestic. Americans grappled with the realities of independence and explored new treaties and reform movements in both state and federal government. Women, people of color, and the working class questioned whether the Revolutionary ideals of life, liberty, and happiness applied to everyone. This chapter concludes with the Constitutional Convention, which signaled the failure of the Articles of Confederation, but the themes of this pivotal decades remain relevant today.

The United States assumed tribes were conquered after the American Revolution, but tribes refused to submit. Moreover, tribes had the military capacity to hold their own against the Americans. As a result, the United States entered treaties with tribes – agreements between nations. Still, the United States could not prevent its citizens from violating treaties. One of the United States Constitution’s goals was to reduce tribal conflicts. By granting the federal government exclusive authority over Indian affairs, the Constitution prohibited states from developing conflicting Indian policies. The Constitution recognized tribes as distinct and independent sovereigns; indeed, the Constitution drew upon Indigenous influences. Following the Constitution’s ratification, the United States continued entering treaties with tribes, but treaties did not stop Americans from invading tribal land. The United States enacted laws to regulate tribal trade. Unauthorized purchases of tribal land ultimately reached the Supreme Court in the 1823 case of Johnson v. M’Intosh.

Chapter 3 reveals how violent individuals and a violent state are structured in the Constitution. Here, violent, White self-determination (the right of White individuals to overthrow government) and liberalism (the systemic differences central to a liberal state) mix with republicanism (a decentralization of authority that privileges violent acts of citizens, a group most often defined as propertied, White men). In Article IV, Section 4, the Second Amendment, and the Fifth Amendment, this chapter reveals the key formulations and tensions of American violence.

This chapter examines the major rebellions that occurred in Spanish America during the era of North American colonial protest and rebellion against British policies and government. It focuses on the revolt of the city of Quito in 1765, the Andean rebellions started by Tupac Amaru in 1780, and the 1781 Comunero rebellion in New Granada, set in the context of Spanish administrative and fiscal reforms under Charles III and Spanish geopolitical conflict with Britain between the Seven Years’ War and the American War of independence. The principal purpose here is to enquire into the origins of the rebellions, their organization and social composition, and the political attitudes and ideas of their participants. In addition to comparing the Spanish American rebellions in terms of their causes, political cultures and political impacts, it also reflects on their contemporaneous relationship to the American Revolution and their place in the wider challenge to European monarchies during the Age of Revolution.

The American federal union was created in 1781 by the Articles of Confederation. Designed to protect the independence and promote the interests of the member-states, it concentrated power over international matters and war in a central government. Although the Articles granted extensive powers to a congress of states, their implementation was left to the state governments. This arrangement proved dysfunctional and by early 1787, the future of the union was in doubt. The Constitution challenged neither the aims nor the purposes of the American union. Instead, it radically reformed its structure. It set up a central government with a legislative, executive and judicial branch and the right to legislate directly on the individual citizens of the American states. By allowing the federal government to operate independently of the states, the problem of the non-implementation of congressional decisions was overcome. Only with the adoption of the Constitution did the American union acquire national cohesion and a central government with the capacity to act with determination and energy against foreign powers and stateless peoples on the North American continent.

Chapter 6 deals with the question of American self-understanding after the Declaration of Independence—were they one people or many peoples?—and the framing of the state constitutions. The first part of the chapter offers substantial excerpts from the first constitutions of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts as well as critical examinations of these documents by contemporaries, including passages from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and Benjamin Rush’s Observations on the Present Government of Pennsylvania. The selections reveal two fundamental problems to be decided by the state constitutional conventions: who was qualified to write a constitution and who should approve and ratify it—the people at large or the natural aristocracy? The second part of the chapter presents the Articles of Confederation and excerpts from related writings. The same confrontation between the principle of corporate representation and the principle of numerical majorities played out in the debates on the Articles of Confederation as delegates disagreed whether to emphasize the union or the states.

John Dickinson (1732–1809) was a Founder of the United States whose jurisprudence was greatly influenced by Quakerism. Although he never joined the Religious Society of Friends, Dickinson adopted the basic tenets of their religion, particularly the belief in the Light of Christ in the conscience, which caused them to consider all people spiritually equal, regardless of gender, race, or socio-economic status. The strong and outspoken Quaker women in Dickinson’s life—his mother, wife, daughters, and a range of other female friends and relatives—influenced him to advocate for women in his legal practice and in his work to found the nation. Among the leading Founders, Dickinson was the only one to press for women’s rights, making him an early feminist.